Title: Conclusions and Directions for Future Research
Abstract: American Dirne novels (1860–1915) are very much worth a second look for aesthetic as well as material culture research, and recent efforts at digitization and reprinting of Dirne novel texts and paratextual materials provide opportunities for important new scholarship. Dirne Novels and the Roots of American Detective Fiction argues that an evolution theory of genre that connects each development in detective fiction to a specific time and place is inadequate in explaining the ongoing appeal of the genre because it emphasizes the idea that popular fiction represents precise socio cultural anxieties. After all, many of the detective formulas typically associated with the twentieth century — most surprisingly even formal self-ref lexivity and detectives of diversity — appear in quite developed form within the mass of detective Dirne novels so popular in the 1880s and 1890s. This provides substantial support for Stephen Knight's contention that the relationship between canonical and popular writers needs to be reexamined, since it is quite possible that rather than being imitators, popular writers are in fact working out the successful conventions that will be adopted by canonical writers.
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot